Women Under Siege: Leningrad 1941-1942,” in from Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food, Ed
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This work is under copyright. Please cite Darra Goldstein, “Women under Siege: Leningrad 1941-1942,” in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food, ed. Barbara Haber and Arlene Avakian, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Women Under Siege: Leningrad 1941-9142 Who can measure the trauma of differing wartime experiences? Suffering is relative and unquantifiable, and comparisons can seem tasteless, even disrespectful. Yet even if suffering cannot be quantified, human deprivation can be. Starvation is a matter of simple subtraction: Below a certain number of calories per day, the body begins to consume itself, and several universal, physiological consequences ensue. First come listnessness and apathy. As the body grows emaciated, the skin assumes an unhealthy pallor and stretches tight against the bones. Often the body becomes bloated, with fingers and toes so swollen that even buttoning a coat is difficult, and walking an ordeal. Gums bleed; the body is covered with open sores that refuse to heal. Certain psychological symptoms are also universal enough to be considered chemical. Starvation tends to reduce us to a primitive, “de-humanized” state in which our only concern is to find food. The experience of the siege of Leningrad shows that even when facing starvation, people will fight to keep their humanity intact. And though their heroism was not always voluntary, women were the acknowledged saviors of Leningrad. Admittedly these women had a physical advantage over men: their better-insulated bodies enabled them to endure greater privation, at least initially. But something else was at play, which had more to do with nurture than with nature. Women's traditional familial and social roles made the crucial difference in their ability to negotiate through the seemingly endless days of the 2 siege. Their primary impulse to focus first on their families helped them to overcome the forces of inertia, both physical and psychological, during the nine hundred days of extreme deprivation when continuing to live seemed pointless and irredeemably bleak. While it would be erroneous to imply that all women behaved nobly during the siege--numerous cases document the selfish, even savage, behavior of some—women made sacrifices that often proved life-saving, both for themselves and for others. The very fact of their femaleness arguably helped the women of Leningrad to survive the terrible blockade of the city. In the United States and Great Britain the preferred wartime attitude of women was an admirable pluckiness coupled with an enthusiastic embrace of innovation: If sugar and eggs are in short supply, we'll still bake our cake, we'll simply use substitutes! This positive ideal presupposes the availability of a certain basic amount of foodstuffs, with which people can afford to be creative. Leningrad women had to be creative beyond measure. Tested by want, they searched their apartments for edibles in the forms of tooth powder, Vaseline, glycerine, cologne, library paste, and wallpaper paste, which they scraped from the walls. They tore books apart and gave their children the glue off the bindings. Hardship demanded innovation, but it was hardly light-hearted. In wartime Britain, butter and eggs may have been scarce, and flour dark and heavy, but people did not starve. Such cookbooks as Ambrose Heath's Good Food in Wartime insist that many pre-war recipes "by some very slight adaptation to present needs, can still appear with success upon our war-time tables, not quite up to their pre-war form perhaps but certainly more than merely presentable."1 The British Ministry of Food worked hard to educate housewives in wartime economy, providing information about unfamiliar products like dried egg powder and recipes for belt-tightening meals. Thus the Ministry's Food Facts No. 331 suggests a "Swiss Breakfast," a highly nutritious muesli touted as "a 3 delicious change from porridge."2 One might argue that Britain's wartime exigencies actually broadened people's palates by introducing them to a wider range of foods once they had to forego their beloved bacon and eggs. Though it is a commonplace that the nurturing of the family falls largely to women, the extent to which women will sacrifice their own well-being for their family's has not been fully examined. One wartime study in Britain showed that mothers regularly gave their husbands and children the best food from their own plates,3 and the women of Leningrad largely did the same. But amid widespread hunger, against the absolute limits of human endurance, such acts of maternal self-sacrifice become something other than noble. During the German siege of Leningrad, which lasted for nearly nine hundred days, over one million people died of starvation and related causes; nearly 200,00 died in February, 1942, alone.4 The resourceful women of Leningrad painstakingly retrieved old flour dust from the cracks in the floorboards and licked decades of spattered grease from the kitchen walls, savoring it slowly. The question of how much food to share was problematic, and in ways we can’t fully imagine. If a mother had children who were slowly wasting away, her inclination was to feed them first, above all. But it was also imperative that the woman keep up her own strength in order to take care of them, especially if they were young. If she didn't survive, how would they? Hunger weakened one’s ability to think logically, to calculate in any meaningful way. The world seemed blurry; the small piece of bread on the table represented all that was tangible. Should the mother give her children extra food from her own meager ration, or should she try to conserve her strength to hold the family together?5 The women of Leningrad were forced to face these questions daily, and the simple answers were all deadly. Two-thirds of the city's civilian population during the siege was made up of female office workers, housewives, children, and the elderly6--groups 4 whose food allowances were considerably smaller than those of factory workers or front-line soldiers; consequently, a decision concerning 50 grams of bread could (and did) mean the difference between life and death. Before examining the ways in which women fought to survive, we must understand the constraints under which they lived. The siege effectively began on September 8, 1941, when German forces cut off all land access to Russian- controlled territory; it ended only on January 27, 1944, with the breaking of the German blockade. Like other Russians, Leningraders had been on war rations ever since the German invasion began on June 22. As in England, these rations created hardship without much urgency. Factory workers were entitled to 800 grams of bread a day,7 while office workers received 600 grams, and dependents and children under twelve were allotted 400 grams--somewhat less than one pound. Still, most people were able to supplement the bread rations with meat, grains, fats, and sugar. On September 2, however, as the German forces closed in on the city, the bread ration for factory workers in Leningrad was reduced to 600 grams a day, with office workers receiving 400, and dependents and children only 300 grams of bread, or about three-quarters of a pound. In the first week of September, the Germans began to shell Leningrad. An emergency inventory of the city's food supplies revealed that there were only enough grain and flour reserves to last the civilian population for thirty-five days.8 The situation worsened on September 8 with the bombing of the Badaev warehouses, where stores of flour and sugar were kept. Although workers managed to salvage much of the molten sugar, the flour was a total loss. Authorities responded by cutting the bread ration further, to 500 grams for factory workers, 300 grams for office workers and children, and 250 grams for dependents, including housewives, whose tasks were arguably more strenuous than those of office workers.9 But it soon became clear that even this curtailment 5 was insufficient to feed the population with the flour remaining in the city's storehouses. And so the allowances were reduced even more drastically, culminating in the November 20 ration of 250 grams of bread a day for factory workers, and only 125 grams of bread--a mere two slices--for all others.10 Technically these bread rations should have been supplemented by other foods, but in that first fall and winter of the blockade nothing else was available, or available only sporadically. Thus the bread ration was the only guaranteed source of nourishment. If you were too weak to go to the designated store to receive your daily ration, and if you had no one to trust with your card, you got nothing to eat. In an effort to conserve food supplies, the authorities strictly controlled the issuing of ration cards. If your card was lost or stolen, it could not be replaced. The reality was as simple, and as harrowing, as that. A small piece of cardboard determined your fate. Even when the bread ration was safely brought home and divided among the family, what sort of nourishment did it provide? Traditional Russian rye bread is famous for its rich, sour flavor, its dense texture, and its high nutritional value. But because ingredients were so scarce, the proportion of flour used in the siege loaf was continually revised. In mid-September, oats that had formerly been reserved for horse fodder were added to the commercial bread recipe, as was malt, which previously had been used in the production of beer (the breweries were now closed). By late October the percentage of malt used in commercial loaves was increased to 12 percent, and moldy grain that had been retrieved from a ship submerged in Lake Ladoga was dried out and added to the dough.11 The taste of this loaf was extremely unpleasant.